Shoot in TV mode and lock your shutter. Turn on the Zebras, hit the esposure and adjust up or down. I like to find a setting where the zebras are evident and then dial it back a notch or 2. Of course it depends a lot on the scene.

Thank you very much for your answers - I think I will then have to stick to the P-mode and control the exposure manually. I was just wondering if there is a trick to also take control of the the exposure in full-auto mode. ;-)

Truth be told, based on your pictures, the exposure looks fine. The cat is the main subject and takes up quite a bit of the frame. The cat is also quite dark so the camera is exposing for the cat. If you got the sky correct in that scene, you'd lose detail in the cat which is currently well exposed.

adding the polarizer is your best bet if you really need full auto. even with Tv and full auto, the camera tends to blow out skies, in my experience. to add a color gradient to the sky using full manual controls, you may end up underexposing other objects in the frame.

you can also replace the skies in post-production, by compositing a nice clean blue sky image with your primary image. that's common.

I just started my journey through Australia - right now I am in Sydney. I'm filming, using a Manfrotto MA 560B fluid Monopod and a polarizing filter. Even though the filter does a good job, I still find outdoor footage slightly overexposed. For this reason I have set it to 'P'-Mode, do a manual white balance (what does not seam to be necessary in bright sunlight), let the HV-10 make a exposure suggestion and correct it afterwards using the zebra funktion. However I find it pretty hard to tell by the built-in display or finder if the overall exposure is OK and if the darker areas don't sink into black.

Well - I don't want to complain. ;) I was just wondering if there is a way to correct the exposure with a general setting by -1 or -2 instead of doing this manually every time I do a new shot.

You can try setting the "Custom" preset picture adjustment. There you have adjustments for color intensity, contrast, brightness and sharpness. For each of these adjustments you have a default, +1 and -1. You might try the '-1' adjustment for brightness and see if that helps you. That will tell the auto exposure to default -1 for whatever it determines to be correct. These settings will remain in place as long as you have the "Custom" setting activated.

Is this the same as AE shift in my Canon XM2?
Would be good, not just lower the brightness, but really adjust the exposure.

I don't know. I also don't know how reducing the brightness turns out in relation to really reduce the exposure. I wish I would have bought this camcorder earlier so that I had enough time to test and play with the various settings. :(

As I have no possibility to watch the footage I have recorded but the camcorder's display, I am not sure how the changes turned out. I did the today's shots with -1 brightness and +1 color intensity. On the display and in the finder it looked better - more saturated pictures. I hope that this was a smart decission!?

Thanks for your replies. The footage I took with the custom settings looks better and is satisfying as far as I can tell by the looks on my old IBM-notebook I have taken with me.

I am very glad that I have transfered some footage to my notebook to check the colors after I have applied these settings - it turned out that the color is now OK but the HV10 records a much larger area than it is shown on the display.

Check the corners of this grabbed frame out:

The camera was set to full-wide-angle. On the display everything looked fine but after transfering the footage to the computer these nasty corners showed up. They were caused by the fixation ring of the lens cover that I have mounted in addition to the polarizing filter. :-/

Regards, Oliver

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